Blood
by clair beaubien
Summary: Set between 4.02 and 4.03. Sam watches Dean clean the Impala. Ch2 now posted: Dean's POV
1. Chapter 1

Proud Mother Note 1: if you follow Matt Cohen on Twitter, my son Joshua is 'the coolest kid ever.'

Proud Mother Note 2: if you were at Chicago when Misha and Jared were answering questions, Joshua is the boy Jared brought on stage to 'high five'.

Proud Mother Note 3: and still, no one at the convention knows my name!

* * *

If Dean ever gets married, I hope he treats his wife at least as good as he treats his car. I mean, hopefully _better_, but you take what you can get.

So, we're Day Five post 'I got my brother back from hell.' Day Three post 'did we mention the seals are breaking and it's _not _a good thing?'. And Day Ground Zero of 'my baby _neeeeeds_ me.' So, we're parked at a do-it-yourself car wash place and since - since the Ipod - I'm only allowed to ride in the car and not touch it, I hike across the parking lot the sub shop to get us lunch while Dean washes and waxes and vacuums and purrs over his baby so much that I might not be able to eat lunch anyway.

When I get back, Dean's in the back seat elbow deep in automotive BCS. I'm _pretty _sure he's _pretty much _forgiven me for the Ipod and I never spent any time in the back seat while he wasn't here, so I don't expect him to find anything to hold against me.

But as I walk past the open back door, he barks at me,

"_Hey - hey - hey. _When were you going to tell me about _this_?"

And when I look, he's holding a crumpled piece of one of my old shirts. It's stiff and brown and completely saturated with dried blood that sprinkles off when he gestures with it. He sounds pissed.

"I - I'm sorry." I stammer out. "I thought that I got all those."

"_Not the rag._" He barks at me again, the '_you idiot' _unspoken but implied. "When were you going to tell me you'd been hurt this bad?"

He doesn't know. He doesn't realize.

"That's not my blood." I have to tell him and it's a whisper that comes out.

"Whose then?"

No, I don't think I'll be eating lunch today.

"_It's yours._"

He looks confused then puzzled then he realizes what I'm talking about and he shoves the rag into the plastic shopping bag that's serving him for garbage. He goes back to digging in the seat which means the moment is over, so I go have a seat on the park bench parked near the door of the car wash bay.

I'd wrapped Dean in a tarp because there was no other way to keep his guts from dragging along as I moved him from the house to the car. Blood covered the back seat and when I'd used up our only two towels and all the paper napkins from the glove box, I ripped one of my shirts into halves and quarters and tried in vain to stop the blood while Bobby kept trying to pull me out of the car and I kept trying to not throw up and neither of us got anywhere with our trying.

I can still feel the blood and taste the bile and hear the silence and the only thing that keeps me from going sit in the car just to be near Dean is when he throws out his bag of garbage and pushes a few more quarters into the car vac to give the car _another _once over. We could be here until nightfall. Which, all things considered, is fine by me. I have my brother back, whole and sound and alive. Nightfall wouldn't be long enough.

But he's done while there's still five or six hours of daylight left. He wraps up the hoses and puts away the wax and chamois and all his other little tools of automotive seduction. Lastly he picks up the cooler and our lunch and tucks them into the trunk. Then he heads over to the park bench and sets himself down next to me.

There's no talking. We just sit and we both look at Dean's gleaming marvel of machinery.

"She looks great." I finally say.

"Yes, she does." Dean answers, ever the proud father. But he adds, "You took good care of her, too. Y'know - Ipod excepted."

I laugh but shake my head.

"It wasn't the same car without you."

And we sit in silence a little while longer. The Winchester-appropriate amount of time for deeply felt and therefore awkward comments to dissipate.

"Ready to find somewhere to eat lunch?" Dean asks when enough time has passed.

"Sure."

We both walk to the car and we both stop and look into the back seat. I wonder if we're both looking at the same thing. I'm seeing death and despair and crushing loss.

Dean's looking at something else though.

"I'm glad it wasn't your blood." He says. Then he gets in the car and I get in the car and we drive somewhere to eat our lunch.

The end.


	2. Chapter 2

It's not that I thought the car needed cleaning. I can't count how many times we boosted - _um_, _borrowed_ - a car and left it cleaner than we found it just because Sam had thirteen minutes to himself and nothing else to do. So, even though the car had been in Sam's sole possession for four months, I was 110% sure there'd be nothing in the car to clean or wash or vacuum or pick up.

No, I decided to burn an hour or so detailing the car at a do-it-yourself car wash because I needed to TLC _something _and Sam sure didn't look like he'd appreciate any fussing. So that left my baby.

My _other_ baby - I gave a grin to Sam as he walked away from me to the next-door sub shop to get us some lunch. Yeah, it'd been twenty years since I had to give him a bath, but I _had _given him baths. I'd wiped his nose and combed his hair, and helped him unzip when he zipped more than he should have, and more _personal _things besides.

And _yeah, _Sam was twenty-five years old, he was six feet four inches tall, and he weighed in at two hundred and twenty five pounds - seventy-five of which were probably all _muscle_. But he was still _Sammy. _He was still my _little brother_.

I couldn't help it - I _looked _at the man who could lift a car if he had to or would walk through fire if he had to, but I what I _saw _was the little boy with too much hair and too few toys who always, _always_ reached for my hand whenever we walked anywhere together, whether we were crossing a street or walking from the diner booth to the diner restroom; the little and even _not_-so-little boy who always brought every pain, hurt, and disappointment straight to me.

_My little brother._

So it was with understandable dismay that I pulled a blood soaked rag out from behind the back seat of the car. The rag was big, it looked like most of the back half of a shirt, and it was completely saturated with blood - dried, brown, stiff, _Sam Winchester blood._

For Sam to have lost _that _much blood, it had to have been a massive wound. For me not to have known about it, it had to have been inflicted within the last four months. A wound that huge and that fresh wouldn't have been healed enough to take all the knocks that Sam had been taking in the last few days without coming apart again. So, when he came back with the bag of our lunch, I confronted him."_HEY - when were you going to tell me about __**this**__?"_His expression fell so fast I was surprised it stayed on his face. He muttered a couple of '_sorrys' _and said something like,

"I thought I threw that out."

Right, genius. I'm yelling at you about _medical waste_.

"_When were you going to tell me you'd been hurt this bad?"_

Again with the face, looking like I'd hurt his feelings. Again with the not telling me what I wanted to know. Well, he was going to _start _telling me or I was going to start looking for the wound myself, right here, right now, in the broad daylight.

Finally though, he told me,

"_It's not my blood."_

That was a relief, anyway, that Sammy hadn't been hurt that bad. But _someone_ had.

"Whose is it?"

_Who was it? How'd they get hurt? Did they survive? Where are they now? _

It took a few tries for him to answer me, and he looked like he was going to be sick.

"_It's yours."_

Mine - _right_. What was he talking about? I'd remember being hurt _this_ bad. To be hurt _this_ bad, I would've had to been pretty much rippped -

_Oh._

_**My **__blood._

_Oh._

I shoved the rag into my garbage bag and dug behind the seat again, really _really _hoping I wasn't going to pull any more surprises out. Sam set the bag of lunch on top of the cooler that was next to the car and took himself over to the bench at the door of the car wash and sat there looking like - like his feelings were hurt and he was going to be sick.

Yeah, well, he wasn't the only one.

When I first got back, Sam seemed _uber-Sammy_. Tall, strong, focused, in charge. I walked into that hotel room, and Sam was the Ultimate Hunter and nothing else_, _and if Bobby hadn't been there to hold him back, I know Sam would've taken me out.

But the second he knew it was me, really me, I saw the armor crack and _Ultimate Hunter _dissolved into my little brother who couldn't hug me tight enough, and my one single lifelong prayer '_please let Sammy be okay' _was answered_. _

But that still left those four months.

Sammy hadn't really talked about what he went through when I was gone. I'd only been back a few days and we'd been otherwise kind of busy in the meantime. But even if that blood wasn't his, I'd be surprised if he'd passed those whole four months physically unscathed. We _were _going to talk about that.

But, for now - I was out of hell, I was with my baby, I was with my brother, and if that was all my life came down to from now on, I'd be totally okay with it. Whatever had happened to Sammy without me, he'd survived it, and now that I was back, I'd go back to taking care of him.

As soon as he was ready to _let _me start taking care of him again.

I shoved some quarters into the vacuum machine and gave the car one more go-over to give myself a little more time before I went over to talk to Sam.

Five months ago, I could've - _would've_ - insisted that he show me if and how bad he'd been hurt while I wasn't around, and five months ago he would've complied, at least to an extent, taking off his shirts in the motel room before he went in to take a shower, to show me the extent of any wounds, or the lack of any wounds.

Now - I honestly wasn't sure what would happen if I insisted, or even just asked about any wounds.

Back in Pontiac, Bobby made the remark to Sam, "_Who'd you think you are? Your old man_?" but I knew it was worse than that. Dad had had friends - _acquaintances _anyway - people he could and did go to when he was hurt.

Sam wasn't like that. From all that he told me, at Stanford he only made friends because they approached him first, he'd never initiated it himself. Even meeting Jess was set up by somebody else. And that was _normal_ life. In the hunting life, forget it. For those four months Sam hadn't contacted any of the friends and acquaintances we _did_ have, and I couldn't see him going out of his way to cultivate any new ones. I know Sam; if he got hurt on his own, he patched himself up on his own.

So - that big mess of blood maybe had been mine and not Sam's. It didn't mean he hadn't shed any blood at all while I was gone.

When the vacuum shut off, I looked at Sam, he was studying his boots. He wasn't looking so Ultimate Hunter now. He only looked tired and unhappy. I wrapped up the vacuum and put everything away into the trunk and sat next to him on that park bench. I didn't say anything, I was still working on that, so in the meantime, I just enjoyed being able to sit next to my brother with nothing much to do but breathe.

After a minute or so, Sam looked up and over at the car. I could practically hear the wheels turning in his mind. He might be looking at the car, but he was seeing that night I died and all that blood and everything he hadn't been able to do to save me.

I looked at the car, too, and I saw the four months of Sam alone and desperate, getting hurt with no one he'd turn to for help.

"She looks great." Sam said after a few minutes. He didn't usually refer to her as 'her' or 'she.

"Yes, she does." I agreed. And not just because of the work I'd just done on her. "You took good care of her." Then, just because Sam would be expecting it I had to add, "Except for that Ipod, of course."

He laughed, which was what I wanted. I wanted him to laugh and lose that tired, hopeless look. After he laughed though, he said,

"It wasn't the same car without you."

I looked the car over again. It had hardly changed in forty years. After the accident, I'd put it back as completely and accurately as I possibly could. Pretty much the only thing that had wasn't at least nearly original was the cassette player and the license plates.

I knew Sam didn't mean that the car was quieter without me or had better music or was easier to sit in because he could push the bench seat back as far as he needed to. He meant it was too quiet, too empty, too-not-home. I knew that was what he meant because I'd felt the exact same way whenever Sam wasn't with _me_.

Because the only thing that ever really changed about the car was the physical and mental condition of the people inside of it.

"You ready to go eat that lunch?" I asked. We were alive and together and that was all we needed right then.

"Yep."

We walked to the car and I watched Sam for any sign that I might've previously missed that he was hurt or sore or favoring any particular part of himself, but there was nothing out of the ordinary.

Sam though, he kept his eyes on the backseat of the car. Still seeing what I wish he'd never had to see in the first place. Time to remind him - _again _- that I was back and okay, and he wasn't on his own anymore.

"I'm glad that wasn't your blood." I told him.

Sam looked up at me, like he was surprised at what I'd said, or that I was there to say anything at all. But then he nodded and got in the car, and I found us someplace to eat lunch.

The End


End file.
